Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

Wallace Stevens
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter's death.

Wallace Stevens
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Wallace Stevens
It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye. The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

Wallace Stevens
Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave
Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

Wallace Stevens
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.

Wallace Stevens
To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

Wallace Stevens
One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,
When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.
He mocks the guinea, challenges
The crow, inciting various modes.
The sparrow requites one, without intent.

Wallace Stevens
Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

Wallace Stevens
The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,
For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags....

Wallace Stevens
If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

Wallace Stevens
A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons.

Wallace Stevens
The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

Wallace Stevens
The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
Who, to find what will suffice,
Destroys romantic tenements
Of rose and ice....

Wallace Stevens
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.

Wallace Stevens
Above the forest of the parakeets,
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

Wallace Stevens
There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place.

Wallace Stevens
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine.

Wallace Stevens
How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

Wallace Stevens
What's down below is in the past
Like last night's crickets, far below.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Wallace Stevens
All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

Wallace Stevens
After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

Wallace Stevens
It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

Wallace Stevens
The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,
Because, in chief, it, only, can defend
Against itself. At its mercy, we depend
Upon it.

Wallace Stevens
Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

Wallace Stevens
The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.

Wallace Stevens
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.

Wallace Stevens
The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.

Wallace Stevens